I’ve been tweeting now for well over two years and have had my Tweets sent to my Facebook status and my IM status and to my blog for some time. This makes it look as if I were very active everywhere on the Net. Really it’s just me and my phone out taking notes. No big deal. Unless you are one of this year’s new Facebook user (and you know who you are) who feel like they have to read every status of every friend (I’m flattered but it’s nothing vital or I would have written you directly or started a chat session).

Thing really revved up when I started live-tweeting events. “What is with this # thing, Jones?” Well, this # thing, called hash tagging, is a way to let tweet on the same subject be read and discovered by anyone interested in that subject or event. http://hashtags.org or http://search.twitter.com let you and others follow along or catch up or read about an event you had to miss or a subject that interest you.

My live tweets of Oliver Smithies’ talk with Tony Waldrop at the Health Sciences Library was hash tagged with #uncnobel (here I used a nice service called tweetag.com).

Twitter folks liked that but Facebook friends were confused by the # and by the frequency of my tweets.

On Thursday Night, I was a judge at the UNC YouTube Tournament. Of course I tweeted that live as #yttour as the list of the videos and the results weren’t being posted til the end of the night. My tweeple were mostly appreciative (or stopped following me ;->), but Facebook friends were again confused. Several did start comment threads on the statuses though.

Today at a panel on social media for the Triangle Association of Black Journalists, we had pretty savvy crowd in the audience and on the panel. Live tweeting on the panel were @waynesutton and @communityMRG — aka Wayne Sutton and James Wong respectively — and myself. Several audience members tweeted questions and comments. All of the tweets tagged #tabj were projected behind the panel on a very large screen using TweetGrid (written by Raleigh’s own @jazzychad). This really facilitated discussion and helped keep the audience and panelists involved. Still one friend had to post “dude… your twitter is boiling over :)” Err, we were all rocking there, pal. In fact, Wayne was live streaming the event on UStreamTV too so we had our full Tweet+Video operation going.

Those who were worried that Facebook feeds would replace Twitter can relax. Twittering behavior on Facebook is not well-groked.

3 Comments

That’s why I don’t send tweets to Facebook status. Most of my tweets are too inconsequential to be a status. I WOULD, however, like to have any new facebook status go out on Twitter. Need a way to reverse engineer it.

There’s a FB app called Selective Twitter something or other – integrates Twitter and Facebook but only puts Tweets on your FB status that contain #fb.
Of course, then that confuses the hashtag crowd – but at least you can control which tweets go to status.